Enrolment call out
ACCA is pleased to open enrolments to the Digital Signals Summer School
9:30am – 3:30pm, Saturday 14 February 2026
This one-day summer school program brings together artists, thinkers, and practitioners whose work critically and imaginatively rethinks and reshapes how we inhabit digital realms. Moving across artist-led workshops, conversations, talks, and performances, the program explores digital sovereignty, digital mysticism, and speculative world-building as lived, (dis)embodied, and contested practices — asking who owns digital space, how technology shapes identity and culture, and how we might transform ourselves through shared digital imaginaries.
Presenters and speakers include:
- Sarah Aiken
- Ryuta Aoki (appears courtesy of ACMI)
- Amanda Bennetts
- Naveed Farro
- Ruby Justice Thelot (appears courtesy of ACMI)
- Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta)
- Thao Phan
- Jon Tjhia
- Keemon Williams
Summer School is an initiative by ACCA that offers a platform for critical discussion, collaboration, knowledge sharing and exchange. The agenda of the school is to hold collective space, however temporarily or provisionally, to think critically, speculatively, and collaboratively about what it means to live in a technology-driven world.
For Digital Signals Summer School, presenters and participants will come together over one day to open pathways toward more sovereign, poetic, and interconnected digital futures.
Enrolment
ACCA encourages artists, researchers, students, writers, critics and enthusiasts interested in critical approaches to art and technology to enrol for Summer School. Capacity is limited with only 80 spots available and participation is free. The event will run from 9:30am – 3:30pm, with two morning sessions at Buxton Contemporary and an afternoon session at ACCA. Morning tea and lunch will be catered.
Digital Signals Summer School will also feature afternoon performances and talks at ACCA by artists and guests, which will be free and open to all.
Schedule
Saturday 14 February 2026
Venue: Buxton Contemporary – 9:15am – 2:15pm
Education and Project Spaces, lvl 1
Corner Southbank Boulevard & Dodds Street, Southbank
9:15am – 9:35am: Arrive
9:35am – 9:50am: Welcome to Country
10am – 10:10am: Introductions and Housekeeping
10:10am – 10:30am: Ruby Justice Thelot
1035am – 1055am: Keemon Williams
11am – 11:20am: Ryuta Aoki
11:20am – 11:50am: Morning Tea
11:50am – 12:10pm: Amanda Bennetts
12:15pm – 12:35pm: Jon Tjhia
12:40pm – 12:55pm: Naveed Farro
1pm – 1:30pm: Discussion and Question Time
1:30pm – 2:15pm: Lunch
2:15pm – 2:30pm: Travel to ACCA
Venue: ACCA – 2:30pm – 4:30pm
111 Sturt Street, Southbank
2:30pm – 3pm: Thao Phan
3pm – 3:20pm: Sarah Aiken
3:20pm – 3:30pm: Suzanne Kite and Closing Remarks
3:30pm – 4:30pm: Drinks
Digital Signals Summer School is co-curated and co-convened by independent curator and producer Anna Nalpantidis and Shelley McSpedden, ACCA Senior Curator, and is supported by the Ian Potter Foundation.
Please note, sessions from the Digital Signals Summer School will be recorded and available to watch (with captions) via our website post program.
Artist Bios and Presentation Descriptions
Sarah Aiken
Sarah Aiken is a Naarm based artist, performer and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Her work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and self – pursuing an ongoing interest in how we situate ourselves in relationship to technology, ecology and society.
Recent work Body Corp premiered at Northcote Town Hall 2025 and Make Your Life Count (Greenroom Award winner) premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in 2022 with subsequent touring to Platform Arts, PICA Perth and Sydney Dance Company with video presentations at Fed Square, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, MCA, and The Substation. Sarah was artist in residence at HIAP Finland, Dancenorth Townsville and Centre for Projection Art and is a grateful recipient of the Creators Fund and the Chloe Munro Fellowship. www.sarahaiken.net
Plot Hole
A work in progress – Plot Hole navigates the unreality of a world made and unmade by truths and untruths – assembling parts to make temporary wholes. The work creates illusions, reframes and mimics the digital – threads of narrative, broken logics, images and refracted light slip through the material of the body – leaving holes and gaps, (metaphorical) smoke and (literal) mirrors. Nothing is as complex, or as simple as it seems.
Ryuta Aoki
My practice takes as its starting point Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. I seek to extend this notion by intersecting it with speculative imagination and contemporary technologies, developing experiments that provisionally bring into being “societies as they could be.”
Born in Tokyo and having moved frequently during my childhood, I became aware of the distinctive atmospheres and tacit norms that subtly guided people’s behavior in each community. I realized that invisible structures exist—forces that determine people’s actions without being seen—and this recognition profoundly shaped my way of perceiving the world. Another formative experience occurred in elementary school: after watching MTV for many hours, I suddenly witnessed a pink piano floating across the living room, gliding silently from wall to wall. At the time I accepted it as reality, but it later revealed itself as an experience that blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, prompting questions about existence itself. These two formative encounters—an awareness of unseen structures and a questioning of reality—together constitute the roots of my thinking.
By deliberately displacing technologies from their intended uses and placing them into unforeseen contexts, I seek to render visible the “invisible structures” that govern collective life—fictions, codes, institutions, algorithms, ecological processes. My aim is to create tools through which participants can critically intervene, momentarily unsettling cognitive frameworks and social contours, and thereby opening new possibilities.
I value a speculative perspective that estranges the everyday and rewrites the world through the agency of fiction. This perspective is reinforced by the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, or chanoyu. Far from being a mere ritual, chanoyu can be understood as a “higher-dimensional play of the spirit” in which nature and humanity, matter and mind, reality and fiction intersect, destabilizing ordinary order and allowing another world to emerge. By further integrating new conceptions of life and humanity presented by advanced technologies and materializing them, I pursue an artistic practice that extends beyond the exhibition space to act directly upon society and the environment.
For me, the artwork does not reside in the finished object, but in the dynamic process that encompasses the discussions, collaborations, and environmental changes before and after. What is exhibited is merely a crystallized fragment of that continuum. What matters most is to make provisional forms of society appear and to share their transformations with others. Creativity, in my view, is not a privilege but a force embedded in everyday life, and the capacity to sculpt society belongs equally to all. My practice seeks to demonstrate this fact and to generate moments in which inequalities of creativity are redressed.
New Poetics: Asian Futurism as Kintsugi for Creative Solidarity
Exploring a New Poetics in Contemporary Practice and Building an Implementation Practice-oriented Platform toward the Realization of Creative Solidarity in Asia.
In an era when social and geopolitical cleavages are laid bare, this art project reweaves Asia’s folk tales and myths, traditional performing and craft arts, and its pop- and sub-cultures through contemporary technologies and speculative, science-fiction perspectives. It builds both a methodology and a practice-oriented platform for investigating new, locality-specific futurisms that emerge from each nation, region, and people.
Each work is valued not only at the moment of exhibition but across the entire arc of its genesis—before, during, and after installation—this continuum being framed as a new poetics. By distilling the polymorphic intersections that constantly overlap and transform one another, the project repeatedly re-examines Asian Futurism.
Guided by the spirit of kintsugi—repairing fractures with gold so the object returns stronger and more radiant—it seeks to reconnect the rifts wrought by history, politics, capital, and today’s information environment through artistic practice, thereby opening a pathway to creative solidarity.
Amanda Bennetts
Amanda Bennetts is an artist whose practice is grounded in the lived experience of a body in flux, shaped by chronic illness. Drawing on clinical and wellness aesthetics, she positions the body as a critical site of inquiry. Through large-scale immersive installations incorporating video, sound, and mass-produced objects, Bennetts explores how illness and care are mediated by culture, technology, and infrastructure. Her work presses against familiar narratives of health and wellness, asking who gets to define them and at what cost.
Algorithmic Omens
In this performance lecture, Amanda Bennetts summons what she describes as the absurdity of the algorithmic omen: the silent digital pivot where a body is reclassified from the lucrative wellness market into a managed-decline segment. Practising from lived experience, Bennetts traces how the body in flux is set on an enforced trajectory of predictive marketing, an opaque rerouting from the transcendent world of optimisation into the colder logistics of bio-depreciation.
Part algorithmic autopsy, part data séance, Bennetts locates Western omen traditions within the vertical infrastructures of contemporary digital platforms, revealing how prediction returns to the body as direction, and how decline can be rendered as a market.
Naveed Farro
Naveed Farro is an artist-filmmaker that examines how cultural histories are preserved, altered, or lost through displacement, drawing on his perspective as a second-generation Iranian-Australian. His practice employs new imaging technologies to reimagine material cultures and histories, particularly when access to artefacts is limited by conflict and political unrest. His most recent ongoing project, The Palace, involved collating archival data online alongside travel to North Atlantic museums to scan and reproduce sculptures from Iranian antiquity at full scale, making them accessible to audiences in Narrm (Melbourne). Through these surrogates, Farro seeks to restore or reframe histories that have been absent or obscured—while examining the politics of reproduction. He pursues this inquiry through hands-on archival research, filmmaking, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Farro’s work is held in the State Library of Victoria collection, and he has presented solo exhibitions at MADA Gallery (2025), Bus Projects (2024), Kings Artist Run (2024), the Immigration Museum (2023), and A1 Bakery (2020). He was selected for the West Space × Parramatta Artists’ Studios Feedback program (2025–26), a skills-development and generative mentorship initiative focused on digital hybrid practice within Australia’s contemporary art ecology. He is a recipient of the Expand Lab Moving Image Commission and a recent MFA graduate of Monash University, where he also teaches Film Studies.
Iranian Art Archives and Histories Through New Imaging Technologies
An invitation to trace my artistic journey over the past few years, reflecting on key projects that have shaped my hybrid digital practice as a means of more deeply understanding my Iranian ancestral heritage. Ultimately, these projects aim to explore how contemporary imaging technologies, such as photogrammetry and augmented reality, can provide a new form of three-dimensional access to Iranian visual cultures. It seeks, first, to contribute to current discourse and practice in presenting archive-focused contemporary art; and second, to make artefacts and fragments from Iranian art archives and built environments accessible to audiences through galleries in Narrm (Melbourne).
Ruby Justice Thelot
Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist based in New York. He is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University. He is the founder of the award-winning creative research and design studio 13101401 inc. His artwork and research focuses on the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence, the metaverse and the implications of being-on-line. It has been shown at venues like Interaccess in Toronto, Miami Art Week and Museum of Modern Art. His work has been featured in publications like the New Yorker, Artforum and Art in America.
The Physics of the Image: A Genealogy of Slop
“The Physics of the Image: A Genealogy of Slop” traces the material and computational forces shaping contemporary visual culture, from scarcity to optimization pressures.
Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta)
Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) is an artist, composer, and scholar whose work merges Lakȟóta knowledge systems with performance, sound, sculpture, and computational media. She holds a PhD from Concordia University, Montréal. Kite is Director of the Wíhaŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI. She is also Co-PI and Co-Director of the international Abundant Intelligences Research Program. Wíhaŋble S’a Center is previously a National Endowment for the Humanities–designated Humanities Research Center at Bard College. She is Distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American & Indigenous Studies. Major projects include Cosmologyscape (Creative Time, 2022–24), Dreaming with AI (Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2025), List Projects 31: Kite (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025), and Wičháȟpi Owihaŋke Waníča Kiŋ (Infinite Collapsing Star) (Bockley Gallery, 2025). Her work has been featured internationally at the Guatemala Biennial, Whitney Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, and the Shanghai Biennale. Kite is an enrolled citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and lives in Catskill, NY.
Cosmologyscape
Cosmologyscape is a public artwork by Kite and Alisha B Wormsley that invites you to tap into the cosmic quilt of our dreams. We are all born with the ability to dream, yet our dreams are shaped by conditions outside ourselves—our access to the space, time, and resources that allow for good rest. Many of us understand dreaming to be an important tool for self-understanding, but dreaming is also a collective act. For hundreds of years, Black and Indigenous communities and numerous cultures around the world have used dreaming to listen to the past and reimagine the future. Cosmologyscape seeks to reinvigorate individual and communal dreaming practices. For the past five years, artists Kite and Wormsley have been gathering with other artists and practitioners who use dreams for guidance and vision in their work to build a growing community of dreamers. Cosmologyscape builds on this work by offering Dream Paths that can help anyone tap into their dreams. Listen, watch, make, and meditate alongside these facilitated dream offerings. Then, if you have a dream, submit it to the Cosmolgyscape website. Your dreams, translated into a system of Lakota symbols and Black quilting patterns, will inform the creation of a series of earth sculptures by Kite and Wormsley. Installed in public space, the sculptures will act as sites for safe rest.
The project is a collaboration between the cosmos (the unseen realm) and the landscape (the seen realm). There are many diverse ways of connecting with the dream world. The artists wish to recognize the knowledge passed down from their elders and those who devote their lives to this practice. This project acts as an archive of the artists’ current thinking and dreaming along a long arc of their dream work.
Thao Phan
Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). Thao has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research.
Technologies of Purification
In 2017, Google launched Perspective API: an AI-powered tool designed to detect “toxic comments online. “Toxicity online poses a serious challenge for platforms and publishers” they write, “online abuse and harassment silences important voices in conversation, forcing already marginalized people offline.” To counter this, the Perspective API tool used a machine learning model to identify abusive comments and give them a toxicity rating represented as a value between 0 and 1. The score could then be returned to commenters as feedback, assist moderators in their review processes, or to filter out “toxic” content for readers. In this talk, I explore how the language of toxicity and purification has come to stand in for naming structures of domination and oppression, such as sexism, racism, ableism, and so on. I ask: what unsteady modes of classification are reified through these ambiguous processes of automated identification? What kind of labour does this rely on? And can we address toxicity without fetishising purity?
Jon Tjhia
Jon Tjhia is an artist, writer and editor working through radio and podcast, literature, photomedia, music and publishing, as well as community organising and access. A settler born and living on Wurundjeri biik, his works include Access Lab & Library, the Manus Recording Project Collective and Paper Radio.
Generative encounters — sensory access and digital art
What can sensory access reveal, provoke and generate — and what collective acts can generate access? In this short participatory session, we’ll share how encounters with digital access and art can quickly lead to rich, ekphrastic texts from aggregate imagination. And with new computational tools poised to assume responsibility for providing sensory access where it is otherwise elusive, we’ll take a quick check of new access apps and their caveats.
Keemon Williams
Keemon Williams is a queer artist of Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam and South Sea Islander descent, whose work seeks to dissolve preconceived archetypes of personal and broader identities.
Through an interdisciplinary approach to practice, William’s expands his relationships with location, personal histories and cultural plasticity, reconciling a sense of belonging in the ubiquitous, uncanny everyday.
Project Ragdoll
Keemon Williams discusses an upcoming long-format collaborative work “Project Ragdoll”, in which the artist engages the general public to co-commission a new mascot for so-called “Australia”. Through a humble online survey the project encourages participants to reflect on their experiences, views and hopes for the future of our complex National identity. The session is an opportunity for audience feedback and input from attendees ahead of the survey’s national launch.
